Vendu! Weeks after Sanofi cuts ties to Alnylam, the pharma giant offloads $842M of its stock

Sanofi has cut its last remaining link with Alnylam, 5 years after the two first began their collaboration and just weeks since the Boston biotech told investors that they were formally ending the partnership.

A spokesperson for Alnylam says they were told last night that Sanofi $SNY had sold off its chunk of shares acquired when they partnered up, reportedly for $80.25 a share. Morgan Stanley acquired the stock.

It’s a big stake. At the beginning of this year, according to Alnylam’s last quarterly update, Sanofi owned 10,554,134 shares — or just under 10%. That would have cost Morgan Stanley $842 million.

Word on the Street is that Sanofi’s new CFO — Jean-Baptiste Chasseloup de Chatillon, recruited last summer — isn’t inclined to hang on to the stock of the pharma giant’s former partners, as Myokardia$MYOK found out after Sanofi bowed out of their pact at the beginning of this year.

Alnylam quickly moved on to Regeneron for a major league alliance, well after Sanofi had identified the program it wanted to keep, allowing Alnylam to proceed on its own with the rest. Sanofi, meanwhile, has been intent on forging its own path under new R&D chief John Reed. That means a bigger focus on its in-house work and a strategic shift away from partners like Alnylam and Regeneron, where it worked on a string of new drugs.

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